I know the Globe has problems these days, but if they can find a way to hang on to Adam Kilgore, it would be a good thing. His Extra Bases post today is the first sensible thing I've read about this team since the season started. He's one of few mainstream newspaper reporters to use more advanced metrics, and, as a result, he's able to contextualize the team's early struggles in a way that goes beyond simply looking at the baseball-card numbers, which really aren't that meaningful at this point in the year.

First off, good for the Red Sox for getting out in front of the weather and postponing early, rather than letting everyone drive down, pay for parking, sit around in the cold and rain for hours (all while shelling out more and more cash for hot dogs, beer, etc.) and then postponing the game two hours after the start time.

We're posting our predictions anyway, though, just so we can get on record. The usual disclaimers apply: predictions are, ultimately, a silly, meaningless exercise, and when you're trying to guess at things like individual award-winners, there's really just no point to it. But it's kind of fun, also, so why not.

As Wally
fluffs his fur after a winter-long hibernation and the Sausage
Guy scrubs down his grill, the Boston
baseball season gets set to commence on Monday afternoon. (We’ll be live-blogging
the 2:05 p.m. game right here at Sox Blog.)

But you
were our geeky blowhard know-it-all. And
when you rolled into town not long after that awful Bronx
night, a good-guy gunslinger pledging, at long last, to make us whole,
promising to “make 55,000 people from New York shut up,” few could have
predicted, despite the fact that you'd done it before, how emphatically you’d make good on your word — never mind the incredible
circumstances under which you’d labor to do so.

One of the most bizarre phenomenons in the world of sports fandom is
the way people approach players whose careers have been marred by
frequent injuries. It's sort of like a hyena mentality: they lie in
wait so they can pick at the carcass after the kill has already gone down,
laughing all the while. (I'm just going to assume I've completely
mischaracterized how hyenas operate; please, zoologists out there,
don't bother e-mailing me as I am already acknowledging my mistake in
advance).

7:07 - Where's Remy???
7:13 - First of 2,367,987 W.B. Mason ads this season.
7:18 - Josh Bard digs into the batters box, secure in the knowledge that Doug Mirabelli is not walking through that door. And........pops up to end the inning.
7:25 - Brad Wilkerson's a bum! Get rid of 'im!!! Charged with an error, Twins up 1-0.
7:26 - Aaaaand, 2-0.

News item: John Henry renews his call for what he describes as an "enlightened" version of a salary cap in baseball.

We hear the argument for a cap in baseball quite frequently, usually around times when the Yankees have spent a lot of money. Allow me to say, then, that I disagree with both the owner of my favorite baseball team and the editor of this very publication and suggest that a salary cap is really not going to fix much of anything.